While it’s true that all three members of The Police were consummate musicians, and that the band’s songwriting talent was undeniable, guitarist Andy Summers admits there was another reason for their success.
“We were cute guys. We were nice-looking guys,” he tells Vulture of himself and bandmates Sting and Stewart Copeland. “Everybody went mad because we were completely sellable as a pop unit. If the three of us were together and we turned up anywhere, a huge crowd would appear.”
“We weren’t exactly a boy band, but we had tremendous adulation and appealed to the female section of the audience, to put it politely,” he adds. “They wanted to be with us, talk to us, and give us their money.”
Summers, who will launch a solo U.S. tour June 5, is also happy to take the credit for the success of the band’s biggest hit, “Every Breath You Take,” even though he didn’t technically write it.
According to Summers, the song’s parent album, Synchronicity, “went straight to #1 … because I wrote the guitar line for ‘Every Breath You Take,’ which transformed it.”
As Summers tells it, Sting and Copeland were “arguing for weeks” about how the song should sound.
“Finally … Sting said, ‘Go on, go in there and make it your own,'” he recalls. “I went in and the famous guitar line came to me very quickly. … When I finished the guitar line all in one go, they all stood up and cheered. It sealed it.”
“I recently saw that it hit two billion streams on Spotify,” he adds. “I was just about to write to the accountant in London and go, ‘Should we talk about this?’ Because even if it’s half a dime for every play, it’s got to be a lot of money.”
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